Picture Archival Communication Systems (PACS) is an industry term for the system and software that permits images from one or more imaging devices such as X-ray imaging device, Ultrasound imaging device, computed tomography device (CT), magnetic resonance imaging device (MRI) and Nuclear Medicine imaging device, to be electronically acquired, stored and transmitted for viewing or analysis. In addition, PACS acts like a central storage for a number of radiology documents such as images, reports, presentation states, videos, sound clips, other notes and alerting information. Multiple standards of communication such as Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) allow standardizing the export and communication of the radiology documents.
Authorized users can view the radiology documents, such as images of a medical subject, on diagnostic workstations. In addition to viewing the images, the users can also view data associated with the image such as name and sex of the medical subject. A radiologist and/or a physician typically use a diagnostic viewing application to view the data and images associated with the medical subject. A diagnosis performed by the radiologist and/or the physician on a medical condition possibly present in the medical subject is solely based on the information contained in the images and the data.
The radiologist and/or the physician may be unaware of additional information about the medical subject that may help in aiding the diagnosis in terms of providing a historical data of the medical subject.
Due to lack of this information, the radiologist and/or the physician may miss on opportunities to do accurate diagnosis. The diagnosis as in most cases is limited to manual inspection and may not be able to anticipate future problems. Hence the diagnosis may fail in providing a futuristic healthcare solution.
Hence there exists a need for a system and method of providing additional information associated with the medical subject thereby aiding the diagnosis.